Contents

The polls are closed and the results are in. We once again had some extremely close races and the large new of new categories this year certainly made things interesting. Congratulations to each and every nominee.

A breach-of-contract and copyright lawsuit filed nearly 13 years ago by a successor company to business Linux vendor Caldera International against IBM may be drawing to a close at last, after a U.S. District Court judge issued an order in favor of the latter company earlier this week.

Judge David Nuffer said that all of SCO’s claims against IBM are dismissed, and that briefs for a final legal certification of the judgment would be due Feb. 26, with responses, if necessary, on March 11. Nuffer re-opened the case in 2013.

The end of the near-immortal “Who owns Unix?” case looks to be near after a US judge knocked out the two remaining arguments with which the SCO group hoped to attack IBM.

As we reported on Tuesday, Judge David Nuffer of the US District court found against SCO’s attempt to work a breach of contract angle in its long-running dispute with IBM, which centres on SCO code that may or may not have made it into Linux and AIX.

Desktop

There is a lot of Linux news to report today as a lot of interesting things have been happening last few days. Over the weekend Jeff Hoogland, Bodhi Linux founder, briefed folks on the many graphical desktops for Linux including his own. Yesterday, Matt Hartley compared and contrasted long term versus rolling released Linux distributions and Jack Wallen said desktop Linux isn’t really important anymore. Today, Jack Germain said Mandriva offshoot Rosa is a “real powerhouse” and the LF announced collaboration with the White House on new Internet security measures.

Microsoft, Google and other U.S. companies “reached the point of no return” when they complied with sanctions over Putin’s annexation of Crimea by halting all business with the peninsula, according to Klimenko. As a result, it’s “inevitable” Russia will switch state networks from Windows to an open-source system based on Linux, a move 22,000 municipal governments are prepared to make immediately, he said.

The good news is that open source has become the leader on the desktop. The bad news is that a single desktop is not the leader, and that leadership on the desktop may no longer matter.

Obviously, the first statement needs qualifications. It clearly does not refer to the number of users, since officially Linux has yet to break 2%, although, depending on your logic, the actual figure might be several times higher.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Russian internet advisor German Klimenko said the state will consider moving all of its networks off the Microsoft platform and onto an unspecified Linux build instead.

Citing Microsoft’s capitulation to the US government in honoring sanctions against Russia, Klimenko said that the Redmond software giant had reached the “point of no return” with Moscow and that 22,000 government agencies and municipal offices were prepared to drop Windows right now.

Server

The container-based service Docker is gaining massive momentum in the industry, and for many good reasons. The current appeal of Docker stems from issues associated with running VMs, namely that each one has to be provided with virtualized memory and storage resources. Containers make it far easier to run enterprise-grade services and address concerns for data portability, scaling, processing, performance, extensibility and latency.

Docker has long relied on Ubuntu Linux as the default host environment for Docker apps, but comments from the company’s CTO recently suggest that might not be the case much longer.

“We have hired Natanael Copa, the awesome creator of Alpine Linux, and are in the process of switching the Docker official image library from Ubuntu to Alpine,” a user named shykes wrote in a Hacker News thread 10 days ago.

If you’re reading the news lately, you may have heard rumours that Docker founders hired the developer of Alpine Linux, a small, text-based distribution, to move the official Docker images away from the Ubuntu infrastructure.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has rolled out a new Linux-based server that it says will help enterprises manage high-performance, large-volume data analytics and real-time processing workloads.

The platform, called the HPE Integrity MC990 X Server, was announced Tuesday. The company says it was developed in response to growing demand for more efficient and scalable computing power for the datacenter.

On February 9, 2016, Nvidia announced the release a new stable, long-lived graphics driver for all supported UNIX-like operating systems, including GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris.

According to the release notes, Nvidia 361.28 introduces support for the GeForce 945A GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), and implements a non-GLVND, legacy libGL.so GLX client library into the installer package for Linux systems, thus allowing users to choose between the GLVND or non-GLVND GLX client libraries during installations.

Proprietary

An offer of $1.2 billion was made today for the acquisition of Opera Software ASA by a Chinese equity investment fund.

Opera Software ASA announced today record revenues for the fourth quarter of 2015, and on the same day, it received a kr10.5 billion ($1.2 billion / €1.1 billion) buyout offer from a Chinese equity investment fund that’s made up of several companies.

Instructionals/Technical

Most people who use computers understand at least the basics of how they work. There’s the hardware, that actually does the computing; an operating system, that sits on top and serves as an interface between the computer hardware and the programs run by users, and then the actual applications we use which sit on top of that.

Wine or Emulation

We reported at the end of last week that the Wine developers were working hard on the next major update to the open-source software that lets Linux users install and run all sorts of Windows applications and games.

‘N++’ exists as one of the great platformers and ninja simulators. (Check out the review here). ‘N++’ is also a PS4 exclusive… for now. Developer Metanet has announced that a Steam version is in the works with a planned release date of “soonish.”

Now that the Steam Client received one of the biggest stable updates for 2016, the time has come for Valve’s Steam developers to concentrate their efforts on some more awesome features for the cross-platform software.

And so, they announced on February 9 the availability of the first Beta release of the upcoming stable Steam Client version, adding initial support for DirectX 12 games on Windows 10 operating systems (requires the November update), better support for the Steam Overlay with the DOOM game, and drag scrolling for the Big Picture mode.

Although Warner Brothers has abandoned plans for a Linux port of Batman: Arkham Knight, there’s lots of excitement over last week’s day-one release of XCOM 2.

Seemingly out of the blue, Batman: Arkham Knight’s planned Linux and OS X release has been cancelled. In all likelihood, this cancellation stems from the litany of problems with the game’s Windows port, which has been panned by critics and players as glitch plagued and often almost unplayable.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Third… having a specific KDE distro at all seems a bit strange, at least to me (and I am only speaking for myself here, and not any project I am involved with). Having a distro that decides to build its own desktop environment is one thing (a la the Ubuntu team building Unity), but having a desktop environment (one that has put so much focus on being portable) that decides to build its own distro? I can see a whole mess of problems cropping up around that. Ranging from relationship issues with existing distributions using KDE to development and QA issues for a portable desktop environment when there is now a single, standard distro that the KDE project standardizes around.

The release schedule for the upcoming KDE Applications 16.04 bundle has been firmed up.

The approved release schedule puts the KDE Applications 16.04 release on 20 April, while leading up to that is the dependency freeze on 16 March, the 16.04 freeze and beta release on 23 March, and the release candidate on 6 April.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

Rygel 0.28 is currently the stable branch of the project, distributed as part of the GNOME 3.18 Stack, but the developers behind the free media server software are working hard these days on Rygel 0.30, which is developed under the 0.29.x unstable series, and will be distributed as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.

Although the artist view issue is solved, I still don’t have a way to get the albums covers since by default Music just display it for the current track. Until now, I have not figured out how to solve it. If I add a cover in Music playlist model to feed PlaybackPopover playlist model Music breaks.

Reviews

The Rosa Desktop Fresh R series is one of the most impressive and productive Linux releases I have seen in quite some time. Its performance is top notch.

It gets high marks in all the right places: Installation is flawless, the KDE integration is innovative, and the software is reliable.

KDE is one of the most complex desktop environments, so potential users who are less familiar with the Linux OS should approach the default KDE release with the idea that it is a great computing platform but might not be what they need. Rosa developers offer enough options to meet the skill levels and needs of all user classes.

If you find yourself needing a new firefox but your computer and glibc is too old, Vector Linux 7.1 light will fit the bill. People who are more comfortable with a SysV style init over systemd will breathe a sign of relief. All in all VL 7.1 is a viable choice for users who wish to continue using their older computers with a modern web browser.

Screenshots/Screencasts

Arch Family

Let’s start with a very clear warning: this is an Alpha test release. It has only been in development for a month or so. That means don’t whine about this, that or the other thing that doesn’t work, or is missing, or whatever. Celebrate what does work, and appreciate the dedication and talent of the Manjaro community members who are working on this!

To that end, I will start the celebration here with: Hooray! It works! Here is the proof, a screen shot taken on my Raspberry Pi 2 yesterday evening…

Ballnux/SUSE

openSUSE’s Douglas DeMaio writes today, February 10, in a lengthy blog post about the fact that the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling release operating system received no less than four snapshots this week with dozens of updated packages.

Slackware Family

Eric “AlienBob” Hameleers announced Slackware Live Edition 0.5.1 Saturday based on the latest Slackware 14.2 Beta. Hameleers said his livestak is “mostly complete at this point” but still lacks sufficient documentation. That’s the goal for stable 1.0. For folks looking for a distro “well equipped to keep systemd out of our distro for a while” but still boots UEFI machines, perhaps Slack Live is the answer. It comes in Slackware default, Xfce, Plasma, and MATE versions, so why not book ‘er up?

Zacks Research, a reputed firm in the market, planned a poll of sell-side analysts. Going by this poll, Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) was given rating of 1.5. Zacks uses a scale on which the companies are given ratings on a scale of 1 to 5. This scale is termed as sliding scale as the rating of one denotes Strong Buy.

Diversified Trust Co lowered its position in Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) by 25.0% during the fourth quarter, according to its most recent filing with the SEC. The firm owned 4,709 shares of the open-source software company’s stock after selling 1,566 shares during the period. Diversified Trust Co’s holdings in Red Hat were worth $390,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Some of you out there might remember the RebeccaBlackOS project, a GNU/Linux distribution based on the acclaimed Debian operating system and designed to showcase the latest Wayland technologies on top of the Enlightenment desktop.

Canonical/Ubuntu

Canonical’s Michael Hall had the great pleasure of announcing that the ubuntu.com website has been redesigned to make it easier for Ubuntu newcomers to discover the flavours of the world’s most popular free operating system.

The Raspberry Pi is a game-changing computer. While it was primarily designed as a low-cost base on which students could learn to code, it has proven to be much more. Some consumers buy it for HTPC purposes, but more importantly, developers embrace the little computer for other projects, such as IoT.

Unfortunately for some developers, the ARM architecture and rather anemic performance make the Raspberry Pi a poor choice. While some consider ARM to be the future, I’m not so sure — x86 has been surprisingly adaptable. Today, Canonical releases an Ubuntu Core image for the x86-based Intel NUC DE3815TY. Priced around $150, this NUC is more expensive than the Pi, but it is much more powerful too; a better choice for developers needing an x86 platform.

Canonical’s Łukasz Zemczak today informs us that the Ubuntu Touch development team is considering and preparing to release the promised OTA-9.5 hotfix to Ubuntu Phones users to fix the big Mir issue that made users’ smartphone unstable.

It’s an early call, but it looks like some of the maintainers of the official Ubuntu flavors are now discussing which of them will be participating in the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Beta 1 release.

We reported last week that Canonical, through Michael Vogt, informed all users of the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices about the general availability of new all-snap images.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the only complete and working LTS version of Ubuntu Linux out there is the version 14.04.3. Many users have forgotten about the existence of this perfectly usable version of Linux even as the latest LTS version, the 16.04 LTS, is to be released. Given the situation, it has not crossed the minds of many that said update to the fourth version of Ubuntu 14.04 is coming out a whole week later, even though the slight delay in release would hardly make much of a difference.

Mentor Graphics has spun a more secure and industrial IoT-ready version of its commercial Mentor Embedded Linux (MEL) distribution and development platform that moves up to a modern Linux codebase built around Yocto Project 2.0 (“Jethro”). Yocto Project 2.0, which advances to GCC 5.2 and adds Toaster support, among other enhancements, was recently adopted by rival embedded distro Wind River Linux 8.

A new robot made by an industrial engineer has solved a completely scrambled Rubik’s Cube in less than one second. Powered by Arduino, Sub1 uses a solution that’s calculated with Tomas Rokicki’s extremely fast implementation of Herbert Kociemba’s Two-Phase-Algorithm.

Ever wanted to make your very own cloud? Now you can! All it takes is some cheap open source hardware and open source software. For about $200, I was able to set up four Raspberry Pi 2s with the Kubernetes cloud operating system using Fabric8.

Fabric8 is an open source DevOps and integration platform that works out of the box on any Kubernetes or OpenShift environment and provides continuous delivery, management, ChatOps, and a Chaos Monkey. In short, it’s the best framework there is to develop and manage your microservices on. (Full disclosure: I work on the Red Hat Fabric8 project.)

It’s not too often that a workalike board ships before the original, but that appears to be the case for UK-based Elesar’s Titanium development board. The Titanium is not really a clone, but it’s available now with similar features and the same new Texas Instruments Sitara AM5728 SoC that was supposed to debut in the still delayed BeagleBoard-X15 hacker SBC.

Phones

Tizen

Samsung sees the popular Raspberry Pi board as a way for a potentially large number of enthusiasts to develop products with Tizen OS.

For that purpose, the company initiated a port of Tizen 3.0 OS to Raspberry Pi. It is now possible to create custom versions of the latest Tizen OS for the development board through tools provided by Linux-based collaboration projects.

Android

Four third-party app stores for Android have apps with a malicious component that seeks root access to devices, according to Trend Micro.

The security company found 1,163 Android application packages containing the malware, which it calls ANDROIDOS_ LIBSKIN.A, wrote Jordan Pan, a mobile threats analyst with Trend. The malware obtains root access to the phone, the highest level of access and privilege.

To start, the Priv is an Android device with a physical keyboard — this is unique (but not the first). The screen slides up to reveal the 4-row keypad which, incidentally, also doubles up as a trackpad (similar to the BlackBerry passport). The screen is a 2k resolution amoled unit with gorgeous colours and deep blacks. It slides out with a satisfying (and sometimes addictive) spring-loaded action. It also curves slightly on both sides and this allows for some ‘edge’ functionality like a single line battery indicator and slide out actions. Under the keypad, you’ll see the speaker grill. On top, there is a slot each for a nano SIM and micro SD. The micro USB port and 3.5mm audio out are on the bottom edge. Power button is on the left while the volume rocker is on the right. Around the back is a familiar glass weave design — it looks like carbon fiber but is soft to the touch, resists fingerprints and is very durable.

Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit. As we move forward, we will be focusing on the needs of our developers and visitors by building out site features and establishing community trust. Eliminating the DevShare program was just the first step of many more to come. Plans for the near future include full https support for both SourceForge and Slashdot, and a lot more changes we think developers and end-users will embrace.

This year is shaping up to be a big one for container technology, and the Container Summit conference is going on this week in New York. At the event, Datawise, a stealth company developing network and storage solutions for Linux containers, announced that its contributions for container networking and storage have been accepted for the upcoming release of Kubernetes. Kubernetes, of course, is the open source container management system pioneered by Google and now supported by many leading open source vendors.

Google engineers have open-sourced today a new suite of libraries and tools relating to OpenGL called ION.

Details are limited thus far and without yet diving into the source code, ION is described as “a portable suite of libraries and tools for building client applications, especially graphical ones. It is small, fast, and robust, and is cross-platform across many platforms and devices, including desktops, mobile devices, browsers, and other embedded platforms.”

San Francisco, home of the tech startup, is trying to show its tech credentials by becoming the first city to use open source software for elections.

The proposal to adopt a solution in time for the end of the current contract on January 1, 2017 reappeared at the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday when Supervisor Scott Wiener called for a hearing on how the city is progressing with the plan to use standard hardware and open-source software to carry out future balloting.

Open source communities and projects are examples of non-standard work structures that are successfully productive while existing outside typical paradigms for “work.” OpenSSL, for example, is an incredibly important software library that serves a large majority of websites across the web. The authors of the software, ranging from one time collaborators to continuous contributors, have collectively forged arguably the most important networking encryption library to date, and they’ve done it outside traditional business models. The software is a the result of effort from a diverse community of volunteers working on “their own time,” rather than on the rigid production model of a proprietary software development firm.

The final challenge open source presents relates to staff skills. Simply put, open source requires a higher level of technical talent than traditional proprietary solutions, because there’s a world of difference between building a solution and operating someone else’s solution. The latter is the world of certifications and cookie-cutter solutions; the former requires creativity, self-reliance, and technical chops. Newly-hired technical employees tend to come with open source experience and an inclination toward self-generated solutions, while many long-term IT employees are much more comfortable with a vendor-centric world. However, most organizations can’t (and shouldn’t) do a wholesale replacement of personnel. So IT organizations face the task of reskilling existing employees, integrating new staff, all while architecting new systems and ripping out old ones.

A UCLA Engineering research group has made public the computer code for an algorithm that helps computers process images at high speeds and “see” them in ways that human eyes cannot. The researchers say the code could eventually be used in face, fingerprint and iris recognition for high-tech security, as well as in self-driving cars’ navigation systems or for inspecting industrial products.

The algorithm performs a mathematical operation that identifies objects’ edges and then detects and extracts their features. It also can enhance images and recognize objects’ textures.

Events

We were instructed to go very early at 8:30AM in the morning at the Myanmar ICT (MICT) Park to be able register our topics that we wish to talk for the BarCamp Yangon. Finally we arrived early as the hotel and venue is very closer and on the time of the event opening ceremony and everything were spoken in Burmese.

I’ve been going to FOSS (free and open source) conferences since 2006. My first open source conference was FreedomHEC in Seattle, a little 30-person conference for Linux users to protest Microsoft’s WinHEC. My next open source conference was OSCON, which had over a thousand attendees. They were both very different conferences, and as a college student, I really didn’t know what to expect. Going to your first open source conference can be intimidating, so I’ve complied ten tips for people who are new to the conference circuit.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Folks running Chrome on iOS have had a chance to tap into the Physical Web devices around them since last July, but Google’s finally opened that functionality up to its own ecosystem. To that end, Chrome 49 on Android will support the objects (like parking meters, for instance). The first time you encounter one there will be a push notification alerting you one is nearby, and future run-ins will populate a list of the gadgets nearby. It’s starting in the beta channel, a post on the Chromium Blog notes, with wider support rolling out soon. In case you’re curious of how it all looks in action, the GIF below should give you a good idea.

Mozilla

According to a latest and lengthy post published by Kartikaya Gupta on the Mozilla Hacks website, it looks like the upcoming Firefox 46 web browser will finally bring smooth scrolling to the desktop.

Now, we don’t know how many of you out there are experiencing scrolling issues when browsing various web pages on the Internet, but it appears to be a major problem if Mozilla is going to all the trouble of implementing smoother scrolling support into its popular Firefox web browser.

SaaS/Big Data

The end goal of any big data initiative is to deliver key insights very quickly, if not in real-time. While the first step of gathering data is challenging, today’s technology is more than capable of this.

What comes next – extracting accurate insights in real-time and gaining foresight from it – is something enterprises have yet to nail.

When put to good use, data can provide endless opportunities for innovation and growth, saving money and time, while also expediting services. Despite the opportunity to yield big insights from big data, many businesses are struggling with one of two challenges: those unable to tap their big data reserves and those drowning in data overload.

It wasn’t long ago when open source software was on the fringe of cutting edge technology. The software then was rough, untested and insecure. No longer is this the case. From tiny startups to the largest Fortune 20 companies, open source technology is permeating every corner of the business world.

Cable operators around the world are faced with pressures to provide higher bandwidth transport for Internet, video and voice services.. Most operators are opting for standardized, digital and fiber-based solutions that will help them reduce costs and future-proof their technology to support network demands.

Several years ago, the cable industry led the effort for a Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP), to simplify cable headend operations and to move operators toward service convergence and IP video. CCAP combines edge QAM and cable modem termination system (CMTS) functions into one unit to help operators reduce power and space.

LibreOffice

Today, February 10, The Document Foundation non-profit organization has proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of the LibreOffice 5.1 open-source and cross-platform office suite for all supported platforms.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.1, a full featured open source office suite which compares head-to-head with every product in the same category, while standing out with superior interoperability features.

LibreOffice 5.1 offers a completely reorganized user interface, and several improved features targeted at enterprise deployments: better support for ODF 1.2, interoperability with proprietary document formats and file management on remote servers.

Apple/Openwashing

Funding

The errors highlighted here are not merely mistakes; rather, they reveal a worldview. People who believe that Apache is a competitor, OSI approves licenses that permit monopolization, Red Hat is a business that’s succeeded through artificial scarcity, and open source communities with diverse agendas are “broken” are not the people you want in your new open source business.

They will try to persuade you to secure software patents so that they have an asset to trade when you fail; they will eject you from your own company when you try to hold true to software freedom principles; and they will treat your business as a failure if all it does is earn a decent living for you and your employees. You may want to grow your open source-based business another way.

Public Services/Government

A growing list of cyber attacks targeting U.S. government employees has prompted the Obama administration to launch a high-profile cyber security effort that among others things will target Internet “utilities” such as open source software.

The Cybersecurity National Action Plan announced by the White House on Tuesday (Feb. 9) as part of its annual budget submission to Congress gives the Internet and its components equal status with other critical infrastructure. The initiative responds to massive data breaches such as last year’s hack of the Office of Personnel Management. The personal data of 21.5 million federal employers may have been stolen in the breach.

From unmanned aerial vehicles to 3-D printing, new technology has a lot of potential to “flatten” the world and spread social good. And now, by launching its first venture capital-type fund for civic technology, the United Nations wants to accelerate the development of those ideas.

“We’ll be identifying opportunities from countries around the world including some that may not see a lot of capital investment in technology start-ups. We are hoping to identify communities of problem-solvers and help them develop simple solutions to some of the most pressing problems facing children,” says UNICEF Innovation co-lead, Christopher Fabian in a recent statement.

Licensing

Richard Stallman has published a new guide on gnu.org titled License compatibility and relicensing. Gnu.org is home to a whole host of resources on free software licensing, including frequently asked questions about GNU licenses and our list of free software licenses. Our license list contains information on which licenses are compatible with the GNU General Public License as well as a brief description of what it means to be compatible. This latest article by Stallman provides a more in–depth explanation of what compatibility means and the different ways in which it is achieved.

What is licensing? Why does it matter? Why should you care? There are many reasons that licensing is an important part of a project you are working on. You are taking the time to write code and share it with the world in an open way, such as publishing it on GitHub, Bitbucket, or any number of other code-hosting services. Anyone might stumble across your code and find it useful.

Licensing is the way that you can control exactly how someone who finds your code can use it and in what ways.

The ever-popular VLC turned 15 a few days ago–that’s 15 years since the project was GPLed and released to the world. If we were pedants, we might point out that the project actually came into existence in 1996, but that was a different lifetime.

VLC originally was a very different application. For one thing, it was a closed-source project, and its original purpose was to stream videos from a satellite receiver to a computer science lab.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

Members of the Student Government Association and MassPIRG are seeking further support from the University of Massachusetts Provost of Academic Affairs Katherine Newman for the W.E.B. Du Bois Library’s Open Education Initiative.

The OEI, which has been operating for six years, provides UMass professors with $1,000 grants to write their own textbooks and syllabi using information which has an open copyright license.

“Our goal this semester is to get 10 to 15 professors to sign onto Open Education,” said Chris Earls, the SGA’s secretary of University policy and a senior political science and economics major.

Earls and Matthew Martin, coordinator of MassPIRG’s Affordable Textbooks Campaign, wrote an open letter to Newman in which they argued that open source textbooks were an affordable solution to the rising costs of college textbooks.

The all-electric Chevy Bolt was the automotive star of the 2016 CES show, for sure- but there was more to the electric vehicle side of the Las Vegas show than just the efforts of Tesla and the Big Three. Meet the Pixel, a modular, “open source” electric hybrid vehicle designed by France Craft.

Programming

On February 9, 2016, GitHub’s devs made some big announcements for its awesome and acclaimed Atom open-source hackable text editor, which reached stable version 1.5 for all supported operating systems.

Keeping up its push to be an enterprise presence, GitHub has announced the latest version of the for-pay, enterprise edition of its code-hosting platform.

The company says GitHub Enterprise 2.5′s focus is “companies operating at massive scale” — enterprises with more than 10,000 developers and exponential year-over-year growth. The new toolset for GitHub Enterprise 2.5 helps large teams add new users, collaborate safely on large projects, and deal with GitHub-related performance issues that can crop up around such large projects.

Zero point five-six percent. Just over one half of one percent? And this they think is good news? To borrow the phrase from Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “I fart in your general direction!” If you are doing under 1% reactions for your advertising on mobile, you are FAILING. Get out of the business. You are a waste. You are polluting the gene pool. Its exactly what I have preached forever in mobile: Don’t spam !!! Its spam !!! Don’t spam !! (Recently I’ve evolved that even further so now I say: Don’t spam, don’t spy; ask permission and satisfy!)

The company has struggled to attract new tweeters to join its free-wheeling service, and its stock has spiraled to an all-time low this year. Despite Twitter’s efforts, many users continue to face abuse and harassment, and terrorists have disseminated propaganda on the service. In a somewhat self-conscious move, the company rolled out a set of new features this week ahead of its quarterly earnings report , including a new Trust & Safety Council as well as changes to how the Twitter feed works.

Science

Emeritus Professor Esko Valtaoja says the internet is like an endless ocean of knowledge – but there is plenty of rubbish to be found in the deep. In a television appearance Wednesday morning, the recently retired quasar researcher and award-winning writer encouraged everyone to take a month-long break from social media.

[...]

The information revolution has now made more data available in contemporary society than people have time to consume in a lifetime. Valtaoja says that for a long time, it was easy to believe that there were certain absolute truths, because information was much harder to find.

There are still people who believe in absolutes, he says, but they are quickly becoming the minority.

“We jump about rather nervously trying to ascertain the truth, even in this matter,” he says.

Health/Nutrition

More than eight months before Gov. Rick Snyder disclosed a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Flint area, federal health officials worried a lack of cooperation in Michigan could be hampering the public health response.

Thousands of pages of e-mails obtained by the Detroit Free Press through the Freedom of Information Act on Monday show increasing concern about the quality of the Flint’s drinking water as tensions grew over a lack of coordination to combat the waterborne disease.

County health officials were warned for reaching out to federal experts for help while they struggled to persuade Flint city officials to provide needed information, the e-mails show. Others in e-mails wondered about ethical breaches and the possibility of a cover-up.

House Democratic leaders are heaping new scorn on Gov. Rick Snyder, accusing the Michigan Republican of ducking his responsibilities to the victims of the Flint water crisis.

“If you have it within your power to correct your mistake, to make it up to those whom you wronged, you have a moral obligation to do that,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), who represents Flint, told reporters Wednesday. “He hasn’t done that. The governor of Michigan has treated this as … a public relations problem for him, not a public health crisis for 100,000 people.”

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

As the Flint water crisis evolves from ongoing public health crisis to the search for a costly solution, the situation also has taken on the air of a football game, a political football game, that is.

“Some of the actions seem to be more about the people making the statements rather than helping the people of Flint,” said Lansing political consultant Tom Shields, of Marketing Resource Group. “It’s tough not to be cynical because it has become such a political football.”

The crisis over lead-tainted water has become fodder for local, state and national politics where Democrats are assigning blame to the Republican-led administration of Gov. Rick Snyder and Republicans are pointing the finger at Democrats in Flint as well as the Environmental Protection Agency under the control of President Barack Obama.

Security

As a part the latest Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released 13 security patches for all version of Windows and other software like Microsoft Office, IE, Flash etc. Out of these, 6 vulnerabilities were rated critical and demanded immediate attention from your side.

As part of a child pornography investigation, the FBI hacked into over 1,300 computers.

[...]

The FBI seems to have obtained a single warrant, but it’s hard to believe that a legal warrant could allow the police to hack 1,300 different computers. We do know that the FBI is very vague about the extent of its operations in warrant applications. And surely we need actual public debate about this sort of technique.

Transparency Reporting

The state of Massachusetts has some of the worst open records laws in the nation, which have not been updated since the 1970s. The main problem is the statutes provide no deterrence for abusive behavior by government agencies and very little in the way of recourse for public records requesters.

The laws — as they stand now — operate on the presumption of secrecy, which is completely antithetical to the purpose and spirit of the statutes. There’s really no reason the state’s public record laws should contain this much secretive bloat. Here’s Allison Manning of Boston.com detailing just one of the many problems with the laws.

I spent the last five years as a police reporter in Columbus, Ohio, before moving back home to Boston a few months ago. What I’ve rediscovered about my home state: Our public records laws are abysmal, especially compared to those elsewhere.

The defence secretary, ‘comedians’ on BBC Radio’s News Quiz, and the entire media commentariat have ganged up this weekend up to pour mockery and poisonous lies over Julian Assange and the UN’s human rights jurists, writes Jonathan Cook. As they attempt to fight off the UN’s ‘guilty’ verdict against the British state, they are putting dissidents at risk everywhere.

Contreras undersells the public interest — which has been high ever since it was discovered Clinton had been conducting official (and sensitive) business using a private email server. Now that Clinton is a presidential candidate, the release of the emails could adversely affect her campaign.

I don’t believe the State Department has a personal stake in Clinton’s potential presidency, but it’s operating in a way that would encourage people to come to that conclusion. Instead, this is likely business as usual for the agency.

For one, government agencies protect their own. Clinton’s use of a private server makes the State Department look bad because no one with the power to do so ever made an effort to shut her down. Released emails show Clinton dealt with classified material, something that should never have been routed to a private email account. The State Department’s lackadaisical handling of this matter would only be highlighted further by additional releases.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Corruption has once again taken center stage in Indonesia, following the resignation in December of House Speaker Setya Novanto for being caught attempting to extort Indonesia’s largest taxpayer, U.S. mining giant Freeport McMoRan’s subsidiary PT Freeport Indonesia, and mounting evidence that the devastating fires that negatively impacted the country late last year, to the tune of $30 billion, were fueled by local corruption. Political infighting has meant that Indonesia’s long-simmering, critically important fight against corruption has been in limbo for nearly a year, and soon President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo will face a decision whether or not to make fighting corruption the centerpoint of his administration, or its downfall.

To the surprise of many, Indonesia actually improved in the recently released Corruption Perception Index, moving up from 107th last year to 88th this year, which the organization credited to improvements in the country’s bureaucracy and public services – initiatives pushed forward by Jokowi – but also partly to increasing corruption in other countries. However, the report noted that Indonesia could take a huge step forward if it empowered its once famous, internationally renowned anti-corruption agency.

That would be Indonesia’s most trusted public institution, the Corruption Eradication Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, KPK). The KPK has made a reputation for itself globally for thoroughly investigating, researching, and trying high-level targets, and, in its first 13 years, achieving an astounding 100% conviction rate.

The biggest economic disaster in 2015 was the Indonesian forest fires that cost $16.1bn, according to a report.

The fires, caused mainly by illegal slash and burn clearing of forest areas for crops including palm oil, cost the country around 1.9% of its GDP, said Aon Benfield.

In its annual catastrophe report the company said that while 2015 replaced 2014 as the warmest year on record, global economic losses from natural catastrophes stood at $123bn – 30% below the 15-year average of $175bn.

The report said 300 separate global natural disasters occurred in 2015, above the 15-year average of 269 events.

Beijing, we’re finding out, has the kind of pollution that makes it seem like you’re downwind from a freaking volcano eruption. But, a picture like that doesn’t get across the reality of life in a place where the air actively hates you. We sat down with an anonymous source who works as a magazine editor in Beijing, who told us …

In September and October 2015, one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century happened in Indonesia. And despite its apocalyptic consequences, the story was largely ignored by the western media.

In order to clear the Indonesian rain forest for a palm oil, it was lit completely on fire. A toxic cloud of haze resulted, hanging over Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore for weeks. The haze killed people and endangered wildlife, and put the lives of millions of others at risk -– all for the benefit of a selected few.

Last week we wrote about the only place that German politicians are currently allowed to view the latest texts of TAFTA/TTIP: a tiny room, guarded at all times, and involving all kinds of humiliating restrictions for visitors. Katja Kipping was one of the first to enter, and she has written up her experiences for lesser mortals like you and me, who are not permitted to besmirch this sacred place with our unworthy presence.

Labour MPs have expressed their fury after Tory rebels dropped their objections to council cuts because of a new £300m government fund to ease funding difficulties in mostly wealthy Conservative-run areas.

Greg Clark, the communities secretary, insisted the new cash was not a “political bung” to stop up to 30 Tories revolting against the local government settlement.

However, several Tory MPs openly acknowledged they were persuaded to back the government only after the new “transitional relief” was announced, of which about 83% will go to Conservative councils.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

As both Democrat candidates like to portray themselves as an enemy of the financial industry, Bernie Sanders appears to have more leverage (to borrow a finance term). He’s blasted Hillary Clinton for taking over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in early debates, and has continued his criticism into the Democrat town hall debates.

We don’t know exactly what was said in those speeches because Hillary refuses to release the transcripts, but the attendees at those speeches haven’t forgotten. They’re speaking out, and it doesn’t bode well for Hillary.

The northern ticket hall of King’s Cross St Pancras tube station is supposed to be a wonder of the London underground, with its expanses of gleaming floor and high-ceilinged walkways that would be wide enough for cars. In 2008, the tube’s then managing director, Tim O’Toole, assured the London Evening Standard that, with the new hall, which cost £395m, “the underground station complex will … be capable of handling all the extra demand predicted for years ahead”.

Censorship

With censorship issues plaguing the film industry, filmmakers are now looking to release movies on Youtube and other internet sites that do not create hurdles to their creative freedom. In fact, as if to cock a snook at the issue of censorship, director Ram Gopal Varma has announced a film titled `Single X’, which would be dedicated to the censor board.

An Aleppo-based journalist training women to report on the crisis in war-torn Syria, an Indonesian comic who jokes about Islamic extremism and a 19-year-old campaigner against repression in Eritrea are among those shortlisted for the 2016 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards.

Drawn from more than 400 crowdsourced nominations, the Index awards shortlist celebrates artists, writers, journalists and campaigners tackling censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. Many of the 20 shortlisted nominees are regularly targeted by authorities or by criminal and extremist groups for their work: some face regular death threats, others criminal prosecution.

Méxicoleaks, a digital platform that accepts anonymous information from the public, has made the shortlist for the 2016 Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards in the category of digital activism.

“In a country where, between drug cartels and the government, censorship and self-censorship is rife, Méxicoleaks is on the forefront of the fight against corruption,” said the Index on Censorship website.

That changed last week when reports emerged indicating as many as 30 well-trafficked Israeli blogs and popular Facebook users would henceforth be required to submit copy to the military censor prior to publication. As the news spread, some of those affected by the new rules lashed out online, questioning whether the military – and, by extension, the state – was actively trying to limit freedom of expression. A few even vowed to circumvent censorship, though, given that the office of the military censor already possesses algorithmic technology to root out problematic web posts, this seems easier said than done.

The Twitter Trust & Safety Council will initially be formed of around 40 bodies, including the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, EU Kids Online, ICT Watch, National Cyber Security Alliance, NetSafe, and Samaritans.

These organisations, along with safety experts, academics and security researchers, will work to ensure a safe and secure platform for users to express themselves freely and without fear.

The company said in a release that the Council’s main focus will be to protect minors, encourage ‘greater compassion and empathy on the internet,’ and promote efforts in media literacy and digital citizenship. It added that community groups will also participate to help prevent online ‘abuse, harassment, and bullying,’ as well as mental health problems and suicide.

The move by Twitter to further police speech which doesn’t agree with its social justice worldview doesn’t come as a surprise and follows on from the possible news earlier this week that they were planning to control what content appears in people’s timelines by implementing an algorithmic timeline, ostensibly to censor speech that they don’t want people to read.

Facebook allows users to report offensive posts and follows through on investigating and disabling hateful accounts. Instagram immediately takes down photos that violate its community guidelines, and it has sometimes even gotten carried away in doing so.

Among the members are the Anti-Defamation League, Childnet International, Thorn, Family Online Safety Institute, the Dangerous Speech Project, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

Twitter has taken the steps for balancing free speech without also handing a free pass to orchestrated harassment via its platform. According to the announcement, the company is establishing a “Trust & Safety Council”.

On the day Twitter announced a new “Trust and Safety Council,” the social network again suspended an account that calls attention to the plight of people who have been harassed on Twitter.

My colleague Sarah Jeong followed the saga of Trusty Support, a Twitter Support parody account that has been, as she wrote, “lampooning the absurdities of the Report Abuse system” by tweeting about the network’s canned and automated responses to harassment and death threats.

Twitter on Tuesday announced the formation of a new “Trust and Safety Council,” which will work to develop policies censoring speech on the site. The group will be comprised of more than 40 organizations from 13 regions around the world. “With hundreds of millions of tweets sent per day, the volume of content on Twitter is massive, which makes it extraordinarily complex to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and speaking truth to power,” Twitter said in a statement.

In order for users to feel confident expressing themselves “freely and safely,” Twitter is debuting a new advisory group dubbed the “Trust & Safety Council.” But a quick glance at its membership roster suggests the council is almost as Orwellian as it sounds—and overwhelmingly biased in favor of speech suppression.

If you thought Milo Yiannopoulos losing his blue checkmark was the opening salvo in the next great culture war (I tended to agree with Popehat’s Ken White that the controversy was overblown), then this might be your virtual invasion of Poland.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) applauds Jack Dorsey and Twitter for the company’s efforts to combat violent extremism, and we congratulate it on the formation of the Trust & Safety Council, an important step forward to strike the right balance between fighting abuse and hate, and protecting free speech.

The aim of the council is to be able to come up with specific conditions that would allow the company to filter more than hundreds of millions of posts every day to spot any kind of misconduct, and judge whether any of the content protrudes beyond ethical boundaries of free speech.

Criticism is part of life, of course, and I tend to believe that people show their true selves most transparently when they show how they deal with criticism. Unfortunately, we’ve covered entirely too many stories involving people and companies responding to online criticism poorly here at Techdirt. Typically, these unfortunate responses amount to trying to censor the criticism, but it can more dangerously involve the attempted silencing of journalism as well as threats of legal action against those making the critical comments.

Too many times, websites and web services cave to this sort of censorship. But not everyone. Gawker Media, about whom I could fill these pages with criticism, appears to be pushing back on once such attempt levied against its site Jalopnik. Apparently, car-maker Honda took a negative view of some comments made at the site, purportedly by a Honda employee. For some reason, Honda decided that this distinction meant that it could not only silence the comments, but that it should receive help from the site in outing the commenter. The whole thing starts off, as seems so often the case, with some rather mild criticism in the form of a comment.

Free speech advocates are fighting censorship in North Korea by illegally importing popular American TV shows. The goal: To undermine propaganda, give people a taste of freedom and eventually fuel the fall of the regime.

Pyongyang’s government insists that its dictator Kim Jong-un is a heavenly superhero, Americans are evil, South Korea started the region’s civil war in the 1950s and that the rest of the world is not as free or prosperous as North Korea. In order to support these teachings, nearly all media from outside North Korea is banned and citizens are discouraged from questioning the government about problems such as famine or its use of slave labor.

This is also the clown who ruled against investigative reporting in the case of The National Abortion Federation versus the Center for Medical Progress by issuing a preliminary injunction barring the anti-abortion group from releasing undercover videos taken at annual conferences of the National Abortion Federation.

Also mentioned as plotters in the scheme were General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the powerful Central Military Commission who was expelled from the party and was being investigated for corruption when he died of cancer in March 2015; and Su Rong, a longtime regional chief who was accused of corruption as party chief in Jiangxi province. Su was also blamed for showing “blatant disregard for party political rules” and having “poisoned the local political environment.”

Censorship has gone too far, contends Zhou Ruijin, 76, in an essay published in China in January and on Phoenix TV’s ifeng.com early this month. “To be frank, some leaders in the party’s propaganda department were managing the press like how they would manage a train schedule, directly intervening in the approach and procedure of news reporting,” he wrote.

Zhou, a leading liberal writer in the 1990s, attacked today’s propaganda chiefs for taking down offending websites and deleting postings, calling these actions contrary to the concept that the Communist Party govern the country according to law. Moreover, he condemned “waves of campaigns, strict clampdowns, and public shaming,” the last a reference to the parading of people making Cultural Revolution-style confessions on television.

Is there any logic or coherence in the way the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has tried to block objectionable online content? The short answer is ‘no’. Last month, the PTA had provided internet service providers with a list of over 400,000 domains that needed to be blocked for pornographic content. According to the PTA, it had been asked by the Supreme Court to “take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan”. It has now emerged that among the hundreds of thousands of websites on the list provided by the PTA, there are countless websites whose content cannot be considered obscene by any stretch of the imagination. Among these is the microblogging website ‘Tumblr’ as well as websites for photography, ecommerce, blogging and business.

We’re still fresh on the heels of Facebook’s overly broad and prudish decency rules resulting in the takedown of a bronze piece of artwork in the form of a mermaid statue that features bare metal breasts. Womens’ breasts, as we all know, are shameful things to be hidden from view, lest they corrupt the minds of the young children that were so nourished by them in their youth. Sigh.

Still, as dumb as that story was, and as indicative as it was of the problem of overly broad censorship guidelines employed in the name of decency, at least there were breasts. Metallic breasts, but breasts nonetheless. I have no idea how Facebook keeps this recent story from looking even more silly, in which it takes down a piece of artwork shared by Philidelphia Museum of Art that was constructed specifically to show how objectified women were in the 1960s.

I would further question the supposed centrality of free speech and intellectual discourse in combatting oppression and bigotry. Too often, “debate” is merely smokescreen. For example, there exists an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists and the international community that climate change is caused by humans. Despite this general agreement, the U.S. continues to “debate” (really, deny) this fact. This is not a debate in which all sides are seeking to move towards the truth. This is a debate constructed because massive corporate interests will cling onto the idea that climate change isn’t real for as long as possible. The debate is merely for show. On the individual level, the problem with bigots who use slurs (or commit other acts of oppression) isn’t that they haven’t heard a good argument about why using slurs is wrong. The problem is, in spite of hearing those arguments and the continuous requests of marginalized groups, they don’t care. And if people don’t care whether or not they’re a bigot, what’s the point in arguing with them?

Privacy

His position is extreme in its disregard for the privacy of his customers. If he doesn’t believe that companies should have any say in what levels of privacy they offer their customers, you can be sure that AT&T won’t offer any robust privacy or security to you.

Does he have any clue what an anti-market position this is? He says that it is not the business of Silicon Valley companies to offer product features that might annoy the government. The “debate” about what features commercial products should have should happen elsewhere — presumably within the government. I thought we all agreed that state-controlled economies just don’t work.

A federal appeals court is upholding the firearms conviction of a Tennessee man whose brother’s rural farm was monitored for 10 weeks straight by a remote-controlled camera the authorities installed on a utility pole 200 yards away—without a warrant.

The decision (PDF) by the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirms the nine-year sentence of a man named Rocky Houston, who was caught by the camera as being a felon in possession of a gun. The man was on a Roane County Sheriff’s Office watch list after he was cleared of murder charges following a gun battle that left a Roane County law enforcement official dead in 2006.

Ever wanted to know what it’s like to be Edward Snowden? A new video game will allow you to climb through the ranks of a US intelligence agency and decide for yourself if privacy is a worthwhile cause.

With the full blessing of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, an Australian gaming company has launched a Kickstarter campaign to finish development of a PC game called “Need to Know – The Mass Surveillance Thriller Game.”

The game allows you to step into the shoes of an analyst with the fictional US Department of Liberty, a thinly veiled reference to the National Security Agency.

It’s hard to fault the logic of this conclusion, even if it does seem the ATF’s surveillance bumped up against the edges of the Fourth Amendment. What happened in aggregate was not a violation because no individual aspect of it crosses over the “expectation of privacy” line. An ATF agent with a camera filming from across the road wouldn’t have violated Houston’s privacy, even if the agent could only do so for a single 8-hour shift.

Romania-based VPN service Cyberghost is known for its distinctive service that derives inspiration from its slogan “Reboot the Internet”. This team of highly motivated experts provides its service to more than 7.5 million users with an aim to make cybersecurity your top priority. Apart from the paid plan, the company offers a great free VPN plan and lets you use your own free web proxy as well.

FBI Director James Comey may think encrypted iPhone messaging “is a problem in our investigations,” but two privacy-minded members of Congress have a plan to defend it.

Congressmen Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Blake Farenthold (R-Texas) have introduced what they call the Ensuring National Constitutional Rights of Your Private Telecommunications (ENCRYPT) Act of 2016. It’s an attempt, Lieu and Farenthold wrote in a letter to their colleagues, to address “[c]oncerns over the privacy, security and technological feasibility of a ‘backdoor’ into encrypted devices for the government and law enforcement” by making encryption a federal issue and keeping individual states from trying to ban it.

Legislators in two states have proposed (largely unworkable) bans on the sale of encrypted phones, citing (of course) concerns about all the criminals who might get away with something if law enforcement can’t have near immediate access to the entire contents of their phones.

In reaction to these stupid bills, national legislators have stepped up to offer their own counterpunch: a nationwide ban on encryption bans. The Daily Dot’s Kevin Collier has the details.

The NSA isn’t too concerned about the use of encryption. Unlike the FBI, which continues to claim the sky is falling darkening thanks to the spread of math, the NSA is relatively comfortable with the march of technology in this direction.

For one thing, the NSA has made progress towards cracking some forms of encryption. On top of that, it maintains a unit that does nothing but stick implants into hardware that allows it to bypass protection schemes used by its targets.

The U.S. National Security Agency on Monday outlined a reorganization that will consolidate its spying and domestic cyber-security operations, despite recommendations by a presidential panel that the agency focus solely on espionage.

Civil Rights

If you’re a CIA Director, one would assume that you know how to be cool under fire, right? Apparently that’s not the case for current CIA Director John Brennan who seemed to completely freak out when Senator Ron Wyden started asking questions about the CIA’s infamous decision to spy on the network and computers of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who were compiling a report on the CIA’s torture program. The details are a bit complex, but the short version is that the Intelligence Committee, which has oversight powers over the CIA, had been set up in a CIA building, with special access to CIA documents, and a special search tool. Apparently, at some point, that search tool returned a document which the CIA had never intended to share with the intelligence committee staffers. That document, called “the Panetta Review” was a draft document that then-CIA chief Leon Panetta had tasked people internal at the CIA to prepare on what the Senate Intelligence Committee staffers were likely to find as they went through the documents.

All in all, this motion to suppress evidence worked out for the plaintiff, but it does little to address concerns that drug dogs are basically blank permission slips for inquisitive cops.

The defendant — Emile Martin — was in a vehicle driven by another person (simply referred to as “Montgomery” in the opinion). This vehicle crossed the centerline multiple times and was pulled over by Deputy Brandon Williams. The driver could not produce registration or proof of insurance, which led to the issuance of a citation… eventually. But the citation process was unnecessarily prolonged to provide the deputy with a chance to have a K9 unit brought in to sniff the car for drugs.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Google today told the world that its ad service is ditching the notorious Flash for HTML5 in upcoming months. The company will stop accepting ads based on this security nightmare, starting on June 30, 2016, and will complete drop them on January 2, 2017.

A little over a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the minimum definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream — to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. The standard better reflects household usage in the gigabit connection and Netflix binge watching era. However, the broadband industry has been whining like a petulant child ever since, largely because the change highlights how a lack of competition and the resulting failure to upgrade networks means a huge swath of the country doesn’t technically have broadband.

Copyrights

Music publisher Warner/Chappell will no longer be allowed to collect licensing royalties on those who sing “Happy Birthday” in public and will pay back $14 million to those who have paid for licensing in the past, according to court settlement papers filed late Monday night.

The settlement is a result of a lawsuit originally filed in 2013 by filmmaker Jennifer Nelson, who challenged the “Happy Birthday” copyright. “Happy Birthday” has the same melody as “Good Morning to You,” a children’s song dating to the 19th Century. But despite the song’s murky early history, music publisher Warner/Chappell has stuck to its story that the song was copyrighted in 1935, and a royalty had to be paid for any public use of it—until now.

After raking in dozens of millions in licensing fees, Warner/Chappell has admitted that it doesn’t own the rights to the song “Happy Birthday”. The music company has agreed to set aside a $14 million settlement fund for people who paid to use Happy Birthday in public. In addition, the court has been asked to enter the song into the public domain.

The companies and organizations that run the Internet’s domain name system shouldn’t be in the business of policing the contents of websites, or enforcing laws that can impinge on free speech. The staff of ICANN, the organization that oversees that system, agrees. That’s why it’s not surprising that the Motion Picture Association of America, which has consistently sought power to edit the Internet, is now bypassing ICANN and making private deals with domain name registries.

The MPAA and the Donuts domain registry have announced a new partnership aimed at curtailing movie and TV show piracy. Donuts controls the .movie gTLD so the arrangement is symbolic for the MPAA, but how will it work in practice? TF has obtained details of the deal which could act as a blueprint for future voluntary agreements.

The battle for music royalties in Kenya has spurred musicians and artists to demand transparency and accountability in the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK), the body that collects and distributes the fees.

In the continually developing saga that is the Wu-Tang Clan’s unexpected entanglement with the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the pharmaceutical industry, it is now apparently time for the bogus lawsuits to begin.

Artist Jason Koza, a Wu-Tang Clan fan, is suing Tarik Azzougarh, a rapper, producer and manager “associated” with the group, along with one of its members (RZA) and pharma supervillain Martin Shkreli, last seen pleading the smirk in front of a Congressional hearing.

The United States government will have to wait another six months for the appeal in the Kim Dotcom extradition case to be heard. A judge in the High Court in Auckland has just denied US requests for Dotcom’s appeal to be fast-tracked, instead setting a date for this coming August.

The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups are unhappy with how the Canadian Government is approaching the problem of online piracy. The country remains very appealing to pirate sites, they claim, while ISPs often fail to warn infringing subscribers effectively.

While we have written quite a bit about major professional sports leagues marching towards expanded streaming options for viewers, and while each league is making progress in that direction, not all of the leagues are equal in how they’re going about it. The NHL has been by far the least progressive in this arena, which is somewhat strange given how much more progressive it has been on other issues of modernity. On streaming, however, there seems to be some flip-flopping, with the league banning the use of services like Periscope by journalists, but then seeking to piggyback on baseball’s fantastic MLB Advanced Media product to get better streaming to its viewers. The entire point of increased streaming options is to get the product out to as many people as possible, grow the fanbase, and ultimately rake in more money via increased viewership.

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What Else is New

The latest tactics of the patent microcosm are just about as distasteful as last month's (or last year's), with focus shifting to the courts and few broadly-misinterpreted patent cases (mainly Finjan, Berkheimer, and Aatrix)

The fightback against Section 101 and the US Supreme Court (notably Alice) seems to concentrate on old and new buzzwords, such as "Software as a Medical Device" ("SaMD") or "Fourth Industrial Revolution" ("4IR"), which the EPO recently paid European media to spread and promote

Infomercials are still dominant among news about patents, in effect drowning out the signal (real journalism) and instead pushing agenda that is detached from reality, pertinent facts, objective assessment, public interest and so on

A discussion about the infamous abundance of patent cases in the Eastern District of Texas (TXED/EDTX) and what this will mean for businesses that have branches or any form of operations there (making them subjected to lawsuits in that district even after TC Heartland)

The patent microcosm is so eager to stop the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that it's supporting sham deals (or "scams") and exploits/distorts the voice of the new USPTO Director to come up with PTAB-hostile catchphrases

Judgmental patent maximalists are still respecting high courts only when it suits them; whenever the outcome is not desirable they're willing to attack the legitimacy of the courts and the competence of judges, even resorting to racist ad hominem attacks if necessary

With or without the Unified Patent Court (UPC), which is the wet dream of patent trolls and their legal representatives, the EPO's terrible policies have landed a lot of low-quality patents on the hands of patent trolls (many of which operate through city-states that exist for tax evasion -- a fiscal environment ripe for shells)

The money-obsessed, money-printing patent office, where the assembly line mentality has been adopted and patent-printing management is in charge, is devaluing or diluting the pool of European Patents, more so with restrictions (monetary barriers) to challenging bad patents

he media in Europe continues to be largely apathetic towards the EPO crisis, instead relaying a bunch of press releases and doctored figures from the EPO; only blogs that closely follow EPO scandals bothered mentioning the new petition

The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) sees the number of filings up to an almost all-time high and efforts to undermine PTAB are failing pretty badly -- a trend which will be further cemented quite soon when the US Supreme Court (quite likely) backs the processes of PTAB

The EPO is trying very hard to silence not only the union but also staff representatives; it's evidently worried that the lies told by Team Battistelli will be refuted and morale be affected by reality